John Baldessari: Somewhere Between Almost Right and Not Quite (With Orange)

The American artist John Baldessari rose to prominence in the late 1960s, combining Pop art's use of mass media imagery with Conceptual art's use of language to create a unique body of work that has become a hallmark of postmodern art. Early in his career, Baldessari began incorporating images and text utilized by the advertising and movie industries into his photo-based art. He appropriated pictures and movie stills, juxtaposing, editing and cropping them in conjunction with written texts. The resulting montage of photography and language often counters the narrative associations suggested by the isolated scenes and offers a greater plurality of meanings. The layered, often humorous compositions carry disparate connotations, underscoring how relative meaning can be. Throughout his long and celebrated career, Baldessari has continued to play with and critique popular culture, and over time he has increased the scale and visual impact of his work. This publication looks at new works Baldessari created on commission for the Deutsche Guggenheim.

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About the Author:

John Baldessari was born in National City, California in 1931, and lives and works in Santa Monica, California. His work has been exhibited in museums such as The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, and in art galleries worldwide. He has also recently curated exhibitions at The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, in Washington D.C., The Museum of Modern Art, New York and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. He is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery in New York.

Matt Mullican was born in 1951 in Santa Monica, California, and he currently lives and works in New York City. He studied at the California Institute of the Arts, and presented his first solo show at the age of twenty-two. His work has been exhibited in the US at the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, Artistsi Space, and the Kitchen in New York, the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and abroad in Belgium, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. In 2005 he had a solo show at Tracy Williams Ltd. in New York, and his work appeared in a group exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angelesis Geffen Contemporary space.